The impact of a large object belonging to the Soviet SS-9 Scarp FOBS into waters near Shag Harbour, in the Canadian province of Nova Scotia on October 4, 1967, initiated one of the major recovery operations of a Soviet military satellite in the cold war.

The first Soviet US-A (RORSAT) spacecraft was Kosmos-198, that was launched from Baikonur LC90/19 at 1128 UT on 27 December 1967 by a Tsiklon-2A. It entered an orbit at 266-270 km with a period of 89.86 minutes and moved to the high orbit late on 28 December after 21 revolutions. The first available element set for the high orbit is valid for the afternoon of 29 December with altitudes 895-951 km. This spacecraft caused a lot of confusion in the Kettering Group since the TASS announcement said it transmitted on 19.365 Mhz, the same frequency given for the failed lunar probe Kosmos-111, launched in the spring of 1966. We heard no signals from either of the, but because of the frequency similarity, we thought Kosmos-198 was related to the lunar program, and we were nor alone in thinking so, but the problem of Kosmos-198 continued to bother us.

On October, 2, 1967 they launched what initially looked like a standard RORSAT satellite. After two days the satellite suddenly separated, as expected by us. The test submarine was located off Canada, in the vicinity of Nova Scotia, outside Canadian waters. A malfunction took the satellite off orbit and we could track it by monitoring the active radar pulses of its seek-and-track module. The satellite was flying almost grazing the upper atmosphere. To our surprise, and to the desperation of the Soviets, it was heading into Canadian territory.

We had collected enough data about the FOBS SS-9 from previous tests on July 17, and September 19. However, while those objects were launched from Ukraine and the Volga Valley, the October, 2 vehicle was launched from the Easternmost site in the USSR. The West-to-East path made the failed RORSAT to cross Canada and finally impact near Shag Harbor.

We were probably conditioned by the events on July 2, 1967, when Vela 4 and Vela 3 satellites detected a flash of gamma radiation unlike any known nuclear weapons signature. Actually, we were really concerned on the possibility the Soviets were implementing new orbital weapons unknown to us.

In Jan 12, HAL, the Heuristically Programmed Algorithmic Computer, became operational at the HAL plant in Urbana, Illinois. A series of experiments consisted in testing new spread-spectrum techniques by communicating with a submarine located somewhere close to Nova Scotia (I think it was Halifax) while having HAL to perform the signal classification. The experiments were run from Jun to October, 1967. They sent signals using this new spread-spectrum techniques and the submarine(s) were instructed to decode them and send back a pulsed signal following a pre-specified modulation scheme.

In Jan 27, we signed the Outer Space Treaty with Russia banning the orbiting of nuclear weapons. The treaty entered into force on October, 10, 1967, just six days after the Shag Harbor incident.

Basically, the Fractional Orbital Bombardment System was a Soviet ICBM program and therefore of a prime importance for us. After launch the satellite would go into a low Earth orbit and would then de-orbit for an attack. It had no range limit and the orbital flight path would not reveal the target location. This would allow them to hit targets on US soil from the south, which is the opposite direction from which NORAD early warning systems were oriented.

The Outer Space Treaty banned nuclear weapons in Earth orbit. However, it did not ban systems that were capable of placing weapons in orbit, and the Soviet Union avoided violating the treaty by conducting tests of its FOBS system without live warheads.

Satellite television came to the Soviet Union in 1967, with the installation of the Orbita series satellite receivers throughout Siberia and the Far East. They were clever enough to use one of those stations for the telemetry downlink of the RORSAT launched on October, 2.

That was a busy year for us all. Outbreak of hostilities in the Middle East on 5 June 1967 and China detonation of its first hydrogen bomb prompted that on Jun 23, President Johnson and Soviet Premier Aleksei Kosygin held a meeting in Glassboro State College in New Jersey. Imagine: you have just signed a treaty banning the deployment of nuclear weapons on the Moon and "other celestial bodies", and just 5 months later you have the Chinese testing their H-bomb.

By October 1967 we already knew we were losing the war in Viet-Nam. So, we were living in a new world in which the Soviet - we thought - were ahead in placing orbital weapons, the Chinese had their ultimate weapon, and racial turmoil were storming our streets all across the country.

To complicate things, our Vela satellites were reporting the existence of gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), now recognised as the most violent events in the universe, though by then we were fully convinced they were originated by Soviet new orbital weapons. That was the context that night of October, 4, 1967.

we were face to face with a Soviet submarine in the Nova Scotia waters, a submarine hell-bent decided to not allow us to recover what ever was left from the RORSAT FROBS in Canadian waters. For about one month tension grew to unbearable limits.